Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years." "This story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage. And in a powerful, mesmerizing narrative,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 7.3 - AR Pts: 2
Language
English
Formats
Description
Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic. Here is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. A book to be treasured, it is about the power of the word, and about the power of spirituality to move and shape one's life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Angelou's unforgettable work offers a gem of truth on every page.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 30
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4 - AR Pts: 9
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love...
5) Native son
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Bigger, a young black man in Chicago, kills his first victim in a moment of panic. He then goes on to kill again. The book describes the feelings of freedom and identity Bigger gains from these acts.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.3 - AR Pts: 2
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
There are three rules in the neighborhood: Don't cry ; Don't snitch ; Get revenge. Will takes his dead brother Shawn's gun, and gets in the elevator on the 7th floor. As the elevator stops on each floor, someone connected to Shawn gets on. Someone already dead. Dead by teenage gun violence. And each has something to share with Will.
8) The help
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 23
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the African-American women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.
Author
Publisher
Scribner Paperback Fiction
Pub. Date
1995
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.6 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...
12) Song of Solomon
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume no. 216
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.
13) Becoming
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 29
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
14) Erasure: a novel
Author
Publisher
Graywolf Press
Pub. Date
[2001]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
"Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been 'critically acclaimed.' He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited 'some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.' Meanwhile, Monk struggles...
Author
Publisher
Scholastic Press
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 6
Language
English
Description
This ghost story gave me chill after chill. It will haunt you. -- R.L. Stine, author of Goosebumps Do you know what it feels like to be forgotten? On a cold winter night, Iris and her best friend, Daniel, sneak into a clearing in the woods to play in the freshly fallen snow. There, Iris carefully makes a perfect snow angel -- only to find the crumbling gravestone of a young girl, Avery Moore, right beneath her. Immediately, strange things start to...
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 371
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
Author
Series
Publisher
Dover Publications
Pub. Date
1995.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.9 - AR Pts: 7
Language
English
Description
Perhaps the most powerful and influential black American of his time, Frederick Douglass, cmbodied the tumultuous social changes that transfored the united States during the nineteenth century. In a career of unprecedented breadth, Douglass rose from the oppression of his slave's birth to fame for Abolitionist
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Based on three years of research and reporting as well as 850 interviews with sources, many of whom have never before spoken for publication, Oprah is the first comprehensive biography of one of the most influential, powerful, and admired public figures of our time.
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Description
"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
The shaky marriage between Henry McAllan and his city-bred wife Laura becomes even more unstable when his brother Jamie returns from World War II in 1946 to help work the family's miserable cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, along with his comrade-in-arms Ronsel Jackson, the oldest son of local sharecroppers, who soon learns that his heroics in battle mean nothing in the Jim Crow south.